Social Glass

Recent discussions at work have prompted me to re-iterate something very fundamental that often gets overlooked when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. An organization will never adopt a single social productivity tool. Knowledge will ALWAYS be scattered. We’ve come to accept this on the Internet where search engines make information on a myriad sites searchable, but for some reason organizations think they can get everybody to use “wiki X”, and that the search feature in “wiki X” will be good enough.

Stop.

As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before),

“Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core”

Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.

Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.

A recent press release from businesswire.com highlights Mindtouch’s continued growth in the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace (disclosure: I’m working with Mindtouch’s CEO Aaron Fulkerson on a side project, and I know he’s not a fan of the term “Enterprise 2.0″, but it’s the biggest tag in my tag cloud and I’m duty-bound to make it even bigger). Mindtouch creates a product called Deki Wiki, an open source wiki and community platform. They make money by selling enterprise support subscriptions, a model that is increasing in popularity.

According to the press release, Mindtouch has seen a 100% increase in active installations (200,000 in total) since last year, and is being used by major organizations including FedEx, Microsoft, and EMC (made famous by Chuck Hollis who chronicled EMC’s adoption of Clearspace).

Deki Wiki ships with a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for the technically-challenged user to add and modify content. Moreover, Deki Wiki is a mashup platform and has out of the box integration capabilities with Dapper, Google Charts, widgetbox and Digg, just to name a few services. It can also be customized to integrate with line of business applications, including those that might be exposed by mashup makers like Kapow.

Development Managers will find Deki Wiki’s integration with Subversion and Mantis (an open source issue management tool) to be a big plus.

Aaron Fulkerson is a pretty switched on guy, so I’m expecting Mindtouch to have more and more of an impact on the Enterprise 2.0 market as each quarter passes.

Update: Deki Wiki has had mashup capabilities since June/July 2007. The Dapper extension is new to release 1.8.3.

Read/Write web has just posted about some awesome new features in Mindtouch’s new release of Deki Wiki, version 1.8.3 (disclosure: I am working with Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch on a side project). Deki Wiki is an open source enterprise wiki and can be downloaded and installed behind the firewall. This is a great option for organizations weary of storing their data “in the cloud” as is required by other hosted alternatives.

Version 1.8.3 has some exciting capabilities, namely:

• Support for 9 languages (with two Spanish dialects included)
• Integration to Amazon S3 services for data storage
• Scalability - run 1000s of Deki Wiki instances on a single host
• “Automagic” merge feature when content is edited concurrently
• Easy integration with widgets and apps using Dekiscript and XML descriptors
• Extensions for Dapper and Google services to support the creation of mashups within Deki Wiki pages (this is probably the coolest feature). Extensions are well documented
• Over a dozen new wiki skins

Aaron has put together a video highlighting these new features (check it out here). The most compelling to me is the mashup capability. Dapper is changing the way information is syndicated on the internet, and Deki Wiki has extensions that make it easy to integrate to “dapps” created with Dapper. Data retrieved from dapps can then be fed into Google Charts or Google Maps, for example, to create a rich visual representation of the data.

This could be a game changer in the enterprise wiki market, especially if Mindtouch provides extensions for enterprise mashup makers like Kapow to provide a mashup capability with line of business applications behind the firewall. A partnership there could prove to be very compelling.

In July this year I wrote about Versionate being the next big wiki platform.   I was impressed with how well Versionate played with MS Office.  It seemed effortless to upload a Word document and convert it into a writable wiki page.  It also seemed effortless to export wiki pages into Word.

I was convinced Versionate would take off because A) they recognized that, at least tactically, collaborative platforms like wikis will have to compliment MS Office to gain user acceptance and B) they were looking into a non-SaaS offering where companies can install Versionate behind the firewall to mitigate data security concerns.

I tried to access the Versionate site to see what they were up to, but the connection timed out.  It could be because of my dodgy internet connection here in the hotel in Mazatlan, however.

Has anybody had experience with their product recently?

The semantic web is often heralded as the next evolution of the internet, Web 3.0. Wikipedia describes the semantic web as an:

evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

Indeed the semantic web promises to make entities like “address”, “contact info.”, etc. which appear within unstructured text on web pages, to be machine parsable through the use of microformats. Other semantic web standards, such as OWL, aim to define the relationships between objects and attributes within a pre-determined ontology.

Behind the firewall, an intranet marked up according to these standards would be information Garden of Eden with relationships between knowledge and metadata about content items being deeply embedded. The Discovery process on such an intranet would certainly be very rewarding given this abundance of “information about information”.

All of this works if content is published using the structural components the semantic web requires. And herein lies the problem - structure.

Within the context of Enterprise 2.0 we often talk about wikis and blogs being emergent - meaning they adapt to the needs and requirements of the knowledge worker. We want knowledge workers to impose their own structures, perhaps with minimal guidance through the use of patterns like scaffolding.

So how are we going to enforce the use of, say, microformats every time a knowledge worker writes an address or somebody’s contact information? Personally, I can’t think of a way without imposing structure. And I’d hate to see said structure reduce participation.

I believe in the value proposition of the semantic web, but to maintain current emergence capabilities, wiki and blog technology will have to be significantly enhanced to automatically mark up content when published. I think we’re a long way off from that being possible.